Why should we encourage the transition towards the LegalTech profession?
Of all traditional business sectors, the legal sector has been one of the slowest to join the digital revolution. This, however, is rapidly changing. In particular, the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated virtually every industry’s path towards digitisation, and the notoriously old-school world of law is no exception with many law firms starting to take innovation more seriously. Legal firms are demanding more innovation in a bid to improve efficiency and as clients seek lower costs; VCs are seeing promise in the space, opening investment opportunities LegalTech startups; corporate legal departments are increasingly—albeit slowly—providing entry-level legal ops and privacy operations opportunities, and legal departments are slowly but surely beginning to develop programs and entry-level roles to target new attorneys.
Depending on their position in the legal value chain, legal professionals may benefit from a transition towards LegalTech even though the legal sector has traditionally been described as risk- and, by extension, tech-averse. As is stressed in the latest episode of The Law of Tech Podcast, if we don’t upskill and reskill legal professionals to a certain extent to understand the world of digital, they are simply not going to be able to cope in the future. In order for them to make decisions about the future, they seriously need to understand the technology they are using on a daily basis and what the impact of such technology is on their daily life. The current lack of knowledge in this regard is holding them back from making decisions – at the end of the day, it is always easier not to make decisions than to make decisions.
In this episode of The Law of Tech Podcast, I discussed in more depth why it is important to encourage the transition towards the LegalTech profession with Sally Sfeir Tait, CEO of RegulAItion, a knowledge-tech company helping to unlock intelligence by reimagining the way in which organisations across the globe access data.
As an ex-general counsel, head of compliance, partner at a global law firm and regulator, Sally has a unique perspective on the interconnected worlds of regulation and technology. She has worked on the core ideas that underpin the operational infrastructure for the new economy. To learn more about RegulAItion, check out their website here: https://regulaition.com/.
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